Dreams 12
Matheson Trapped in your singular consciousness, you wail against the night. As dawn comes, you set out for your daily maintenance and repairs, but these machines are just objects to you now. You remember knowing their most intimate and arcane secrets, can picture yourself mapping out their details and instinctively intuiting their problems in functioning, the necessary repairs, and even improvements on efficiency and purpose. But now, these objects of metal and wiring are more obscure to you than the ways of the human heart and mind. Names of components are on the tip of your tongue, but frustratingly out of reach, and you can't even figure out how to turn one of them on. Your companions are happily eviscerating them, carefully laying parts out in order, but their meaning to you has vanished. You breathe deeply, trying to clear your head as emotion begins to overtake you. There is a battle in your head between screaming and collapsing in tears. Frustrated, you take a nearby branch and lay about you, destroying all the pieces within reach before your compatriots manage to subdue you into a sobbing, wretched heap. Russel The unthinkable has happened. Your chief rival at Arkham, Doctor Renton, has come up with irrefutable evidence of the fraudulent nature of many of your discoveries. The revelation in western China, your investigations in Tanzania, the spectacular find among the lost tribes of New Zealand, even as far back as your studies at Uruk. His repudiation of you is thorough, well reasoned, and entirely documented. His sources are nearly unimpeachable, and all the faculty and students avoid you like a leper. Your tenure may be revoked, your career ended, never allowed to teach, or publish, or research ever again. You try to fight, but everywhere you turn, your plans fall apart. Friends and allies disappear like startled game, and the sources of your work are either impossible to find, entirely unreliable and untrustworthy, or backing Renton's version of events. Kicked out of faculty housing, living on your swiftly dwindling savings, eaten up by rent, food, illicit liquor, and the mounting costs of defending yourself, your solutions are dwindling to the ultimate. XianQi There are dozens of them. Hundreds. Perhaps thousands. The maimed, crippled, diseased, and wounded. All those who came to you for aid, all those you failed, all those who died under your inexpert care, victims to your fallibility and arrogance. They wail, and moan, and mutter, and complain, but unanimously and vigorously, they accuse. They accuse you of their affliction, of your abuse of their trust, of allowing their faith to be misplaced in your incompetence. You are surrounded by this endless mass of the angry dead, all eager for revenge, and you suffer, serially and simultaneously, each and every one of their afflictions: fever, abscess, broken bones, hemorrhage, swelling, malnutrition, gunshots, knife wounds, blunt trauma, ulcerated sores, the full panoply of human disease and suffering. Overcome with pain and terror, your consciousness dissolves. Adams What they say about pictures is true. They are each worth a thousand words, at least. And they do steal one's soul. You are responsible for the theft of perhaps tens of thousands of souls in your career, little pieces of human identity irrevocably lost and contained within the tiny room of your camera, frozen in emulsion on paper, forever trapped and constrained by the mortality of the medium, doomed to suffer as the photograph does, whether by fire, or tearing, mishandling, or time's simple entropic decay. You have now fallen victim to this pernicious effect. Stuck in a simple, candid pose- squatting before a fire, laughing at an errant comment as your food roasts merrily in the flames, you have no idea or memory of how the meal came out. You are able, just barely, to glimpse into the shell of your former body, and see what acts your puppeteer is compelling from you. At first, he played the part of you very well; he smiled and charmed, smoked and slept, but you slowly began to see the cruel and evil nature of that controlling force. Impotent to resist, or even affect the goings on, you can simply watch, despairing, the disappointed, worried, and finally terrified faces of your friends and family as your body spirals down into a pit of depravity and destruction, performing acts of abuse, murder, torture, and rape. Finally, the uppance comes, and your body is killed. Your consciousness, your soul, is returned to a simple existence, depicting a happy moment in the wilderness, for as long as it lasts. Category:Dreams Log